"All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language."
Well shoot. That's all I do too.
LaMDA is not sentient
21–30 of 694 posts
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#22I don't understand why people tend to fall for this. Any AI is just mashing data in smart ways. It is ontologically different from sentience, conscience and all that.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#23So has the author discovered the secret of what exactly sentience or consciousness is. They make some ridiculously bold claims with absolutely no evidence to back them up.
Especially the naive claim that it obviously can't be sentient because it's "just maths". As if humans somehow aren't.
I'm also seeing the idea that because we control when it receives input and generates output that somehow means it's not sentient. Also obviously nonsense.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#24We’re going around in circles. What does it mean to be self-aware?
Moreover, it's incredibly naive to project human qualities (like desiring socialisation and freedom, having empathy or experiencing pain and suffering) on a machine, even if it is "self-aware", whatever that means.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#25I agree with the take that LaMDA is not sentient (not even close). But I think the excessive smack-down of excitement is a little patronizing of the public. Even if they don't know what to do with them, big language models now have internal states that correspond to high level human abstractions like "life" or "love" or "master plan". To be able to create a master plan, you must first be able to represent the concept somehow. That milestone appears to have been reached, and I think a lot of people intuitively (and correctly) see that as a big deal. Turning this "language of thought" into a goal-directed agent is a whole different task. But its progress.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#26"Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent.1 All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language." This is what we, humans, do too when we talk. All these people talk about intelligence in such tautological terms... It's discouraging. We simply do not know if a machine is self-aware and most likely we will never will. Self-awareness is the ultimate subj…
> This is what we, humans, do too when we talk.
That's just not true. It's been discussed many times in literary theory how communication is a two way cooperative game. That's FAR removed from picking the statistically most likely option.
The difference is that the AI has nothing to say, it just mimics what you're saying.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#27> What these systems do, no more and no less, is to put together sequences of words, but without any coherent understanding of the world behind them, like foreign language Scrabble players who use English words as point-scoring tools, without any clue about what that mean. And that is evidence for what exactly? That the Chinese room tought experiment is solved now, with the answer being "the mimicry is different than…
Thanks for putting it much better than I could. I've argued in the previous post about the google employee that people are much too quickly at dismissing claims about sentience.
I find it especially worrying how so many AI researchers are dismissing conscience based on an argument along the lines of "it's a computer program/excel sheet it can't be sentient". It's baffling how little grasp they have about one of the fundamental questions (and the difficulties answering it) of their field.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#28It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#29It sounds like despite all the stories about how hard it is to get through many rounds of difficult interviews at Google, they managed to hire someone who believed LaMDA is a 7 or 8 year old child. "Mr. Lemoine, a military veteran who has described himself as a priest, an ex-convict and an A.I. researcher, told Google executives as senior as Kent Walker, the president of global affairs, that he believed LaMDA was a c…
Lol. This guy sounds like a real joker.
Re: LaMDA is not sentient
#30We’re going around in circles. What does it mean to be self-aware?
Technically, going in circles. Re-entrant signaling.